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Friday, December 5, 2014

Ebola Leaves the US

Taylor Selbst, Brooke Black, & Katie Steele

Staff Writer

After many long weeks of hysteria, the Ebola virus has finally left the United States once the CDC and many corporations worked together to figure out the most preventative course of action. Only two imported cases, including one death, and two locally acquired cases in health care workers have been reported in the United States. Everybody has been taking precautions to stop the spread of the fatal virus. Any contact with an infected person’s bodily fluids will transfer the virus to another person. Even after patients with Ebola die, they still carry the live disease. Doctors deal with this problem by burning the deceased’s bodies so that the disease dies and will not continue to be contagious.

The first person who was diagnosed with Ebola in the United States was Thomas Eric Duncan. He was held at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, where he was admitted Sept. 28 and kept in isolation. He died on October 8,2014. Martin Salia, in Nebraska, was the latest patient to die from Ebola in the United States. At first friends and family thought he had malaria or typhoid since he had originally tested negative for the virus.Three days after having tested negative, he tested positive; false positives are possible the first days of symptoms when the virus has not become strong. When he arrived in Nebraska for the first time on November 15th, he was already critically ill and there was not much that the hospital could do for him. He had already developed kidney and respiratory failure and had to be placed on dialysis and a ventilator. He had even received plasma from a former Ebola patient that survived the deadly virus. Doctors gave him every possible option to try to save his life but they could not stop the disease from killing him on November 17th, 2014.

A huge issue with Ebola is that doctors, nurses, and caretakers often contract the disease as a result of close contact with their patients. For example, Dr. Craig Spencer had contracted the virus while caring for patients in Guinea, where over 1100 people have died as a result of the disease and about 1000 more are currently diagnosed with it. Spencer was being treated in New York’s Bellevue Hospital but was released on November 11 after having been diagnosed as virus-free.

As big a scare as Ebola disease has been in the United States, it is gone now, and Americans don’t have to be as worried about Ebola and making sure there isn’t another huge outbreak. It was almost four months that Ebola was in the United States, and this caused many heartbreaks to many families. The United States is doing everything it can to prevent another attack of Ebola. Hopefully, we can not only stop the spread in the United States but in all African countries as well.